The recent progress in AI is very exciting. People are using it in all sorts of novel ways, from improving customer support experiences and writing and running code to making new music and even accelerating medical imaging technology.
But in the process, a worrying trend has emerged: the AI community seems to be reinventing the data movement (aka ELT). Whether they call them connectors, extractors, integrations, document loaders, or something else, people are writing the same code to extract data out of the same APIs, document formats, and databases and then load them into vector DBs or indices for their LLMs.